Tony E’s Techdirt Profile

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Tony E’s Comments

I don't follow sports ball, but this guy is a treasure. The continued stories of people streisanding, you have to wonder if their PR people haven't caught on or if these cases are the 0.1% that are slipping past said PR people. Sometimes I can't believe the amount of stories I see that involve people calling attention to their own personal secrets.

Or does Francesa actually think that he's big enough that he can stop someone from parodying him with even a weak threat like that?

I kind of feel like this article and others covering this story are trying to make news where there is none. There was clearly a bunch of joking around going on. Letterman laughs and says "he's a good kid" at the end of the clip as is fades out.

No, the mention of fair use "and such" doesn't really mean he was seriously pursuing a lawsuit at any point. It seems like Dave was just getting him back and intentionally trying to make him squirm. I don't really even feel like Phoenix's squirming was very genuine.

*I made a comment on a popular tech blog that there wasn’t a single master key. My comment was incorrect. At the time, I did not properly understand the nature of the hack, and I did not make the distinction between master keys that are actually present on client devices by design (a la DVDs and CSS) versus those that are designed to exist only within the confines of the root-of-trust facility (DCP in the cast of HDCP). However, the author of this blog piece also failed to make that distinction and generally under-researched and mischaracterized the hack, in his usual fashion. For that reason, I won’t name the blog or author.

Seems like all these companies that are getting sued over these ridiculous patents should band together and sue the USPTO for allowing these patents that essentially cause them to get sued.

I know this sounds a little bit like conspiracy, but maybe this whole thing is a racket set up by the gov't. Maybe they are allowing all these ridiculous patents to go through so they can collect all the fees and taxes that go along with filing for a patent, lawsuits, etc.

I just used washingtonwatch.com to find the email for my rep and sent her a message about it. Hopefully this doesn't go through, we don't need the RIAA legislating our software. As far as I'm concerned, we don't need the RIAA at all (as I'm sure most of the rest of the Techdirt community feels).

Amanda Palmer sounds like such a badass. Where are the rest of the badass ladies these days? I like her style. Instead of saying "I'm sorry for offending you with my talk of monies" she comes right out and says "Look, I didn't mean to hurt your marketing-sensitive ears and eyes, but we don't 'market' here, we sell music and music accessories."

I recently emailed AT&T something along the lines of "Why can't you, a giant cell company, offer service at the same price as Boost even though they are relatively tiny compared to you?" (Sorry, I know this sounds like advertising. I apologize.) Frankly, I'm sick of paying them for what I feel is very poor service.

Anyway, I got a marketing response rather than a human response. "We offer rollover, we offer 3G, we offer free back rubs for long term customers blah blah blah" It was this long, inane description of everything I already don't care about. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm glad the artists have to be their own 'marketers' now, because I'm sick of the candy-coating that goes with professional marketing. It's not $14.95, it's $15!

...that drives these musicians to be self-marketing businesspeople. [For the tl/dr crowd, skip to the end] You've got your musicians that do it part time (have a day job), you've got your musicians that "sell out" and make the music they're told to, and you've got musicians good enough to do what they want and still make money.

Musicians that do it part time either aren't good enough at the business side, aren't good enough at the music side (or both), or aren't willing to sell out to let someone else handle the business side.

Those that sell out are, I think, viewed as being in it for the money. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that, but the integrity just isn't there. To some people the integrity is important, and I tend not to support artists that don't have integrity. (Side note: this isn't me making a judgment on these artists or their fans. If you like music that I consider to have no integrity, too bad for me. At least you enjoy it.)

The musicians that are good enough to do what they want either have a label behind them (that they have to fight with and make compromises with like doing ads or compilations) or they have to be their own manager and promoter.

Here's where I'm going with this long, rambling post: the title is "Musicians are Never Just About the Music." This struck a chord with me (bad pun, yay!) because I have this naive, fairy-tale notion of artists with integrity (I also believe in people who don't like to lie, zombies, AND unicorns!) Blah blah blah, point is that maybe the ones who are willing to make calls, schedule their own gigs, answer emails, blog comments, Twitter, Myspace, etc. (be their own manager) are the ones with the most integrity. So I guess what I'm saying is that these are the musicians that are MOST about the music.

For the tl/dr crowd: Maybe the musicians that act as their own label (do their own managing and promotion) are truly those that are most "about the music."

If they fought to not have to pay for her schooling though they had a contractual agreement, they did no good. They lived up to their word after trying to break it--repeatedly. I realize that the point of the article isn't to make Warner Music look good by any means, but saying that they did any good is sort of a bastardization of the notion of "doing good."

Doing good means doing the right thing for the right reason, and they tried to do wrong but got caught. Warner Music basically "did good" to save face and most likely a hell of a lot more money than they would have by continuing to fight her.